Much of the art before the Grat War can be seen as moral in nature while post-Armistice art commonly celebrates materialism if not outright hedonism.

World War I and the Break with History

by Bruce Edward Walker

This weekend marks the formal start to events marking the 100th anniversary of World War I, which took the lives of an estimated10 million military personnel and seven million civilians, and wounded another 20 million. More than 117,000 U.S. soldiers’ lives were lost either on the battlefield or due to accidents and 204,000 others were wounded in an era Pope Benedict XV declared “the suicide of civilized Europe.”

Beyond those lost at Flanders Fields and elsewhere, there exist today other, very real, costs of the Great War. In fact, the 1914-1918 conflict ushered in an “age of anxiety” three decades before W.H. Auden found the words adequate to describe another era of spiritual torpor. The British poet and painter David Jones, a veteran of the Somme offensive, described World War I as “the Break” – the precise chronological moment when humanity divorced itself completely from history and embraced the trophy wife of technology.

American-born poet, critic and essayist T.S. Eliot observed in “The Wasteland” that the war rendered an anthropological and existentialist quandary upon Western civilization from which it would more than likely never fully recover. Tank warfare, aerial combat and the crowning jewels of human endeavor up to the first 14 years of the twentieth century were employed now solely for the destruction of human life and (seemingly to some writers of the time) the entirety of the race’s preceding achievements.

Not that everything was rosy prior to the war. Both Jones and Eliot viewed the war as evidence of already declining religious faith and its aftermath as finalization of the rupture.

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